KEY FINDINGS

• At least 70% of the recent slowdown in health care spending per capita—and possibly as much as 98%—can likely be explained by long-standing patterns known to affect health care spending trends, not by new, unexplained conditions in the medical sector.
• Breaking down those figures, roughly 41% of the slowdown probably resulted from the decline in real per capita income because of the Great Recession.
• Other factors known to affect health care spending growth—such as changes in the number of physicians and hospital beds per capita and in the percentage of the population with insurance coverage—account for somewhere between 32% and 57% of the slower health care spending growth.
• The projected expansion of Medicaid coverage owing to the ACA will likely raise national health care spending in 2019 to about 1% higher than it would have been without the expansion.